This blog is intended to share what we are learning in 5th grade through reflections, pictures, videos, and more! Comments are encouraged and welcome! If you have a positive comment about anything you see, please feel free to share, and we will respond as soon as we can. Thanks for looking!

Thursday, May 3, 2012

When we went to work in the greenhouse with Farmer Curtis last Thursday, we raked, watered plants, planted lettuce, disposed of weeds and rotten vegetables in the compost pile, and harvested radishes for a little snack. Check out some pictures of our experience in the video below:

Today when we went to the greenhouse, we learned more about the functions of plants' roots, stems, and leaves. Then after we worked (watered plants and planted new ones), we harvested our carrots for a crisp, healthy, delicious snack.

Last Friday, we finished our first goals for our current book clubs. Before meeting to discuss the books, however, we spent about 8 minutes generating some thick and thin questions to fuel our discussion of the books. While we certainly were not limited to these question stems, we used these question cards to help generate thick questions:
http://www.lauracandler.com/filecabinet/literacy/PDFLC/qcards.pdf.

So how are our book club discussions structured? Well, book club members take turns leading the discussion by being the discussion director, and they use this guide to help keep the book club on track: http://www.lauracandler.com/filecabinet/literacy/PDFLC/director.pdf. (To fit our needs for this discussion, however, we skipped steps 2 and 4.)

Check out the video below that I (Mrs.Allen) captured as a snapshot of a few of these amazing discussions: